When you surf the web you may require privacy, whether it's because you're sending financial details, researching sensitive information or simply wanting to keep your data to yourself. For this purpose, an increasing number of websites and services are using secure web connections, shown by a padlock or similar indication in your browser's address bar. Such websites also use "https://" at the beginning of their address rather than "http://". Think of it as automatic encryption. But what protection does that give you? How much of your surfing data is secure?

We just made our Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) donations for 2014! Like the previous three years, we picked a theme and then allocated half of our donations to projects suggested by our community
and the other half to our own picks.

In the past year, the importance of secure communications has been made clearer than ever, and so we picked that as our theme.

In April, I gave a talk at Gel, an awesome conference about great customer experience. I spoke about how pervasive online tracking leads to bad customer experiences, and why DuckDuckGo is delivering a better search experience by not tracking users while producing better search results.